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When Experts Go Blind
National Geographic: The picture above is an X-ray computed tomography (CT) scan of a human lung. Go ahead and take a few seconds to look at it carefully. How long did it take you to spot the gorilla? The image takes a starring role in a fun study in press at Psychological Science. Trafton Drew and colleagues at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital showed that when people focus on searching these images for bright white cancer nodules, they never notice the gorilla. More shocking, radiologists — who are trained to read CT scans — usually miss it, too. “It’s a vivid example that looking at something and seeing it are different,” says Drew, a postdoctoral fellow in Jeremy Wolf’s lab.
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Shame About Past Alcoholism Predicts Relapse and Declining Health in Recovering Alcoholics
Feeling shame about past instances of problem drinking may increase the likelihood of relapse and other health problems, according to a new study in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia, shows that behavioral displays of shame strongly predicted whether recovering alcoholics would relapse in the future. Public shaming has long been viewed as a way to encourage people to amend their ways and research suggests that experiences of shame can motivate people to improve their self-image and contribute to a common good.
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Il razzismo si “vede” nel cervello delle persone (race bias increases differences in the brain’s representations of faces)
Wall Street Italia: In un futuro non molto lontano, le scansioni cerebrali potrebbero stabilire se un individuo ha una propensione al razzismo oppure no. Parola di alcuni scienziati, che hanno condotto uno studio che ha dato risultati sorprendenti, secondo cui le scansioni sarebbero capaci di individuare le differenze nel modo in cui gli esseri umani presentano determinate attitudini razziali verso la gente di colore o verso i bianchi.
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The (Really Scary) Invisible Gorilla
The Huffington Post: The Invisible Gorilla is part of the popular culture nowadays, thanks largely to a widely-read 2010 book of that title. In that book, cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris popularized a phenomenon of human perception -- known in the jargon as "inattentional blindness" -- which they had demonstrated in a study some years before. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times some basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed even to notice the beast. ...
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‘B’ is for orange: Synesthesia linked to alphabet magnets in small study
NBC: While Nathan Witthoft was earning his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he met a woman with color-grapheme synesthesia, a neurological condition where people see letters and numbers in color. Most color-grapheme synesthetes perceive the alphabet in their own color scheme, with each letter possessing a different hue. When tested on her synesthesia, Witthoft noticed that it had reoccurring colors, as if her alphabet followed a set, repeated pattern. She mentioned that as a child she had a set of colored alphabet magnets and her letters matched the colors of the letters in the set.
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A girlfriend he never met? Seems silly, but Te’o among many who claim online wishful thinking
The Washington Post: It started out a stunner: The Heisman Trophy runner-up had told heartbreaking stories about a dead girlfriend who didn’t exist. Then it became unreal: The All-American linebacker said he had been duped, and theirs was a relationship that existed only in phone calls and Internet chats. The reaction was predictable: Unbelievable. Couldn’t happen. ... “If we shake the tree, we would find hundreds of thousands of people falling out of the tree who are experiencing something like this,” said Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the California-based American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
